How To Home Your Garden Fantail Doves

Garden fantail doves are very easy to look after and a joy to watch, so when you first bring your garden fantail doves to their new surroundings you will need to home your doves in a suitable dovecote.

Your new fantail garden doves will need your daily attention during the 8 weeks homing period.

This is a very useful time to get to know your fantail doves and for them to get used to you and the new environment around them.

When you get your new fantail doves, they need to become accustomed to their new dovecote home and to their new surroundings, and to establish themselves as a new dove colony in your garden dovecote.

This usually takes around eight weeks and is called the "Homing Period".

This involves confining the new garden doves to the dovecote, and the best and kindest method of doing this is a homing net this is a large net draped over your garden dovecote to form a tent.

I would get a homing net approximately 10 metres square and drap this over the dovecote and to hold the edges down you could use tent pegs, bricks or planks of wood, by doing this the doves can fly around in and out of the dovecote also giving the doves plenty of room to excise their wings.

I would recommend keeping a small amount of medicines as the doves will need to be treated 4 times a year like any other pet to keep them in healthy condition, also before you release your doves why not buy some leg rings with your telephone number on just in case there get lost.

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The best way to describe the difference between a homing net and a homing box/cage is as follows:

A dove homing box is a small box fitted to the outside of the dovecote over one of the doors.  The doves can move in and out but cannot fully stretch and exercise their wings or fly anywhere.

Imagine that you are only allowed to be in the bedroom of your house.  The homing cage or box is limited to the bedroom with a small balcony and you hope the cleaner comes in twice aday and the home help remembers to feed and water you daily.

The dovecote homing net is a large net ranging from 8 sq metres to 12 sq metres, which is draped over the dovecot and pinned to the ground securely.

The dove homing net allows your garden fantail doves to fly within the range of the dove homing net so this is like having a free run of the whole house and garden with water and food freely available. 

This allows your garden doves to exercise, stretch their wings, fly and dart about like fantail doves do.  They can also poo outside their living quarters and away from the food and water which eliminates contamination.

If you want your doves to stay after the 8 weeks homing period and not escape from colditz (i.e. the homing cage) at the earliest opportunity, where would you rather stay?